Re: AC Pro with Sky Q for home use

You can't integrate Unifi kit with the Sky Q mesh. You can have a standalone UAP on a different SSID but that's your lot.

One or the other I'm afraid.

Personally I'd tell Sky to take their crap back (its an awful mesh system, coupled with powerline networking that they had to turn off due to it interfering badly with the VDSL2 signal) and put what you save on monthly rental towards Unifi kit.

None of the Sky kit is DFS certified, nor will it ever be certified so your 5GHz options are limited to C36-48 (which the mesh already uses)....

Edit - I've alpha/beta tested every bit of Sky crap in the last 7 years They don't listen until its too late - I told them powerline networking uses the same frequency band as VDSL2 (profile 30a) but they had to find out the hard way

Edit2 - and IIRC you can't change any of the wifi settings on the Q mesh as its a breach of T&Cs since the kit does not belong to you.

The Sky Q mesh system consists of a router (Sky Q "Hub") and two remote units (Sky Q Mini). The Sky Q Mini boxes are basically streaming boxes from the main Sky Q TV box which double up as a wifi mesh.

Originally Sky intended to use powerline networking to link the remote units but sadly they subbed out the design of the box to the USA where powerline testing initially took place. Everyone in the UK with any electrical/RF knowledge could see this was a mistake as the USA doesn't have ring mains wiring. Upshot was that in beta testing (in the UK) the powerline networking radiated noise all over any adjacent VDSL2 circuit - especially in older properties. A "Doh!" moment for sure.

So the current Sky Q mesh system uses C1, C6, C11 on the 2.4GHz band - all at max power. It uses C36-48 on the 5GHz band (again max power) and IIRC there's no user-selectable wifi settings other than the password & possibly the SSID. This is based on problems the neighbours were having last year, firmware may have enabled options but I doubt it.

The Sky Q system is never going to be certified for DFS operation so in theory you could use UAPs to fill-in 5GHz coverage on DFS channels. Seems like a waste of time to me really, better to get rid of the Q mesh but YMMV.

Re: AC Pro with Sky Q for home use

I don't think you can connect the Minis to anything other than the Sky TV box via Q mesh and have streaming working from that main box/dish/etc.

It certainly used to be the case that wouldn't work. The beta group decided that Sky wanted it that way so they could effectively charge the old multibox prices and then some for Sky Q but its been ages since I looked and policies may have changed. There's the occasional sentient being over at skyuser.co.uk - might be best to ask/look at the TV/VoD side of things there.

In principle you'd be better turning the Sky wifi off and using Unifi kit as that will give you much more control over the WLAN. In practice that might depend on what works on the TV side of things & you might be stuck with Q

Edit - the Minis worked on wired LAN IIRC but not on another AP. I'm really straining to remember here but again IIRC someone tried mac spoofing with another AP so it looked like the Mini but it didn't work for streaming. Long time ago I'm afraid.

Re: AC Pro with Sky Q for home use

I am using my Sky Q (2TB box plus 1x Mini) with my AC Pro and worked fine, however since the Q004.002.XX.XX update something has changed within the network stack that mean the main box will only establish the network connection to wifi and then proceed to disconnect a couple of minites later... which then means the Mini will not work (unless you time it right reall quickly!). I wonder if anyone has experienced this issue and figured a workaround?

I purchansed the Sky Q system to work on its own mesh and support providing a Wifi solution over the 3 floors of my town house however it was so poor i turned to the AC Pro (which has been ace!), switching off the Sky Wifi completely - as i say working fine until the update. I eventually managed to get hold of sky and they sent an engineer 3 weeks ago (before i went on holiday) and we tried a couple new box's and only a new box with the old 001 update worked... so we kept that - this has now auto updated and im back to square one! The engineer raised the issue with Sky, of which no back i'm yet to find the time or energy to spend several hours getting through to them to get an update!

Anyway if anyone else is finding the same challenge and has a workaround, else be mindful of using the same setup! I may now have lost my patience with this Sky Q solution and have them pick it up if they have no fix... If i get a solution from Sky i will update.

Re: AC Pro with Sky Q for home use

Thanks Andy, those devices look pretty good for the price, feels a little rough that part of Sky Q's key feature set in offering wireless access points and scaling out that capability yet is so poor even its own boxes struggle! This was a key selling point to me given this isn't that cheap a setup initially/monthly and then have to implement a further wireless infrastructure and still have to keep buying bits to add on as well as the fact that if you have to bring physical cable to it - we may as well bring the physical satalitte lines in again for the Mini's also... then we are back to square one and may as well have stuck with the old sky HD multiroom solution - Will raise that with Sky .

Plan will be to have the main box wired but have a house being turned upside down being renovated so wanted a more flexible solution .

Re: AC Pro with Sky Q for home use

In terms of my setup I have the main Sky Q box and 1 mini. I have 2 AP's in the house, which were on the same channel but I have now changed to separate non-overlapping channels.

Before spending out on either a Powerline (would 1gb do or is higher speed recommended and would both the Sky Q and the mini need one each?) or running ethernet over the house I'm intrigued by the suggestion of the wireless bridge. I have an old Apple Airport Express - would this perform a similar function to the TP-Link in the previous post?

If yes, I'm assuing that I connect the Airport to the Sky Q box by ethernet and then connect the Airport to my Unifi AP?

Re: AC Pro with Sky Q for home use

This is sort of off-topic really but the Sky Q boxes have powerline networking built in.

AFAIK & I haven't looked in months at what Sky is doing this is disabled by default due to widespread adverse effects on ADSL2/VDSL2 services (NB - VDSL2 in the UK is sold as "fibre broadband/FTTC"). It may well be available on lines which sync above 55/20Mbps but like I say, haven't looked in ages.

You could always just get another UAP and use the unifi controller GUI to wirelessly uplink one to another with a switch on the other end?

Re: AC Pro with Sky Q for home use

You may do better to ask on skyuser.co.uk than here for current stuff on Sky Q, but IMHO...

Essentially you have three choices :

1) Run wired ethernet to rooms;

2) Utilise networking over mains wiring - doesn't work that well in the UK if you're trying to bridge one ring main circuit to another as it goes through the consumer unit (fusebox) and there's likely to be stuff in there from decades ago which (if it's like my 1990-built house) does a great job of shunting the high-frequency stuff to earth;

3) Use a (Unifi) wireless bridge/mesh and have the island UAP connected to a cheap (non-UBNT) switch and run the Sky Minis from that.

Option 3 is probably your cheapest solution given you already have a UAP.

Re: AC Pro with Sky Q for home use

Hi, I'm a telecoms engineer from a BT background who ended up going freelance installing phone systems, then slowly got drawn into domestic broadband, then home networks. Forgive me, but my networking knowledge is pretty basic.

I installed an AC-Pro and an AC-Lite over Cat6 cabling for a customer a couple months ago who had Sky Q and two mini boxes. I put all 3 Sky Q boxes onto cabled connections through a 5-port gigabit switch connected to one of the two ports on the Sky router, made sure none of the Sky Q boxes were working as hotspots, and turned off the wifi on the Sky router so the only source of wifi would be the Ubiquiti APs. They were connected via another small gigabit switch to the other port on the Sky router.

It all seemed to work, then the customer complained that his smartphones and tablets were dropping out every few minutes. I tested this with a Ping app, and sure enough, the wifi connection would drop out for about 15 seconds roughly every 4 minutes as regular as clockwork, regardless of which AP your were connected to (one was in a garden office some distance away). The Sky Q service seemed to be unaffected. Thinking it could be an external broadband issue, the customer called in Sky who replaced the router, and turned its wifi back on. Connected directly to the Sky wifi, I couldn't reproduce the fault, so after much testing of cables and swapping of switches I reluctantly removed the APs and switched on the Sky Q hotspots, and they worked flawlessly throughout.

Any ideas what the source of the dropouts could have been? I'm doing a couple more installations alongside Sky Q in the next couple of weeks, so I'm just concerned this issue could rear its ugly head again! I should add I have 20-odd sites that I've installed over the last couple of years, most with cloud key access, and they all work very well. Thanks in advance for any guidance.

Re: AC Pro with Sky Q for home use

If you have broadband from any provider other than Sky, the Sky Q hotspot feature doesn't work, but the main box and mini boxes should all talk to each other on their own wifi network - the issue may simply be if they're out of range. I've worked on sites where the mini has been hardly any distance from the main box, but hasn't been able to connect to it. The only option would then be to connect the boxes by cable, or use one of Sky's boosters - they look like the Sky router, but are white. I used powerline adapters to get around that on one occasion, so if it's not feasible to run a cable, that's worth a try.

The problem I had at one site (see my previous post) was apparent interference between the Sky Q boxes and the Unifi APs. I still haven't got to the bottom of that!

Re: AC Pro with Sky Q for home use

Just got myself a new Ubiquiti AP AC LITE as I thought it was my old AP (A Cisco 1142n) causing me problems with my Sky Q setup. I'm getting the same as above where it'll connect, but then drop off a minute later. I've tried all combinations of 2Ghz and 5Ghz and channel settings

Anyone got a Sky Q box (Silver in my case) to connect reliably to any AP that's not Sky's router?

Re: AC Pro with Sky Q for home use

I've since found what the issue was with the continuous dropouts, in my case at least - it turned out to be a faulty AC Lite AP. When I couldn't get the setup to work reliably, I took all the Ubiquiti APs out, and it was some time later when I came to re-use one of the APs at another site that I couldn't get it to do a factory default, and it kept coming back up with old ID settings.

Every installation I've done with SkyQ since has been fine, although I've made a point of cabling all the SkyQ boxes so I could turn off all wifi activity other than the Ubiquiti APs, and I've had no interference issues.